BaM™ Product Highlight: Sonifex

Thu 12, 07 2018

Sonifex is a UK based manufacturing company producing technical audio equipment for radio and TV broadcasters across the world. Started in 1969, Sonifex is historically known for making radio ‘cart’ machines in the 1980’s and more recently for its Redbox line of audio and video ‘fix-it’ interfaces.

The company has progressed its technology from traditional analogue to digital and now to IP based networked audio. Focussing on RAVENNA AES67 and more recently Dante®, Sonifex’s new focus is to redesign its product range to take advantage of the benefits that AoIP brings.

One of their newest products recently won a BaM Award™ during the 2018 NAB Show under the “Support” category. The AVN-PXH12 Rackmount AES67 Stream Mix Monitor is a world first – it can simply and effectively simultaneously monitor and mix up to 24 x AES67 AoIP sources in a compact 1U rack to a speaker/headphone combination in a quick and intuitive way.

Sonifex worked with a UK TV broadcaster to produce a product which solved a problem that they had, and one which many more broadcasters will face: With audio moving to the AoIP network infrastructure allowing hundreds of audio sources to be available on the network, how do you easily monitor them, in a product which is simple to use and without adding complexity?

The broadcaster in question has up to a thousand audio sources on their network, available through a large router/mixer and they wanted a device at each position in their main Production Gallery/Control Room which could select multiple audio sources and either mix them down for monitoring, or select them individually. These would largely be AES67 audio sources but they would also need to be combined with physical audio sources available locally.

Marcus Brooke, Managing Director of Sonifex said: “It’s a great honour for one of our new products to be recognised as being outstanding in this industry.

The rise of IP audio and video throughout broadcast is changing the way that broadcasters operate and with the change, new opportunities are arising to develop products in different ways, to offer access to the myriad of audio and video channels available. The mix monitor is a triumph of a simple user interface making the job of monitoring much easier and is just one of many AES67 compatible products that we’re working on.”

The main benefit of the AVN-PXH12 over traditional monitors is the speed with which sources can be monitored. Each unit has front panel headphone outputs and a speaker, together with rear panel analogue outputs. There are 12 x mini channel-strips along the front panel, each with a translucent rotary encoder and 3 selection buttons, allowing confidence monitoring, output mix level display, selection of main or secondary input, channel mute, channel solo and channel send to left, right or stereo mix of the output. With these simple controls, a mix of any of 24 channels can be made quickly and intuitively, ideal for live news environments where audio sources are changing rapidly and need to be monitored instantly.

As well as monitoring any AES67 AoIP stream, SAP discovery has been added to the unit so that AES67 Dante® streams can also be mixed and monitored. Additionally, Ember+ is used for the control communication allowing remote control of the product using the open Ember+ standard.

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